Late last year the IT consulting firm Gartner issued its ‘top ten predictions’ for 2007, and among them was the claim that blogging would level off as the number of people quitting their blogs equaled the number of new bloggers.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now 3 different ‘mathy’ blogs have abruptly ceased operation this month. Foremost was Lance Fortnow’s Computational Complexity, the premier blog for theoretical computer science. The other two blogs, more political but with math as a sideline, were Alon Levy’s Abstract Nonsense, and Tyler DiPietro’s Growth Rate O(n lg n).
If you click on that link for Tyler’s blog, you’ll find that it does not even exist anymore; evidently he felt the temptation to blog would be too strong if he didn’t just chuck the whole thing. While I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment, I feel obligated to mention for the benefit of anyone else who might be considering this, Bora Zivkovic’s plea for the Proper Procedure For Shutting Down A Blog.
Although I wouldn’t attempt to compare these blogs, one thing that they shared was a high output. For me, writing is a slow, tedious, and sometimes downright painful process, so I am always amazed by people who are able to write with such apparent ease. Unfortunately, it would also appear that they have simply burned themselves out in the process (at least as far as blogging is concerned). Of course, there is no need to worry about that happening here. At the rate of an entry per month, it would be almost superfluous for me to ever quit.
Finally, by way of balancing the karmic blogging equation, last month the mathematician Terence Tao started his own blog, What’s new. Tao is a recipient of both a Fields medal and a MacArthur fellowship, and his blog should be of great interest to mathematically-minded readers.
Tyler and I are now sort of joint blogging at < HREF="http://greedygreedyalgorithms.blogspot.com" REL="nofollow"/> if you’re interested.Question – how would you go about calculating the ‘lifespan’ of a blog? Where would you get that information?
Link | April 1st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Stupid anchor tags…
Link | April 1st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Hi foxy. I tried to take a closer look at your comment to see what happened to the anchor tag, and realized that Blogger doesn’t seem to provide any edit capability on comments. (Probably just as well, seeing as how it could lead to certain types of mischief.) I’ll have to check out your < HREF="http://greedygreedyalgorithms.blogspot.com/" REL="nofollow">Greedy, Greedy Algorithms<> site.I’m not sure if there’s any way you could reliably calculate the lifespan of a blog. If the blog contains a complete archive, then you could use that. You could try creating a script to automate the process, although it would be a pain to properly handle all the variations on how archive files could be stored and dated. And for blogs that don’t have complete archives, you’d get erroneous results. Of course, once a blog is deleted, you’re out of luck. I imagine that Gartner got its data second hand from sites like Blogger and WordPress, that would have internally maintained statistics on when websites are created or deleted. Bloggers that use their own domains and local copies of software probably get excluded from the stats, but they would be a minority of bloggers anyway.
Link | April 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am